Chris, who I’ve had the pleasure of sitting next to for a couple of years at mN (and who makes the most delightful cup of tea), crafts marvellously intricate sketches of whatever wanders into his mind on the trains to and from Liverpool each day and sticks them up on his site, sketchybeast.com. Balancing ridiculous prolificacy with masterfully craftmanship and a flair for twisted Victoriana and the unusual, each piece has a short but rich backstory hinting at much more to come and I, for one, want more.

February 14th, 2008 by Ad.
It's all about the stuff and nonsense | No Comments »

While Gruber, as one would expect, makes convincing arguments and some good points in both his recent posts regarding gearlive’s flash-on-the-iphone rumour, I can’t help the feeling that he’s missing something:

The iPhone SDK is not going to be the sort of environment like Mac OS X where developers are free to create system-level plugins. No one is going to get to diddle with MobileSafari without Apple’s approval.  

You’d get no argument from me there, but maybe there’s another way. What if – and it is an if – Adobe were to write a legit iPhone app that functioned as a new AIR platform, so us legions of hungry flash designer/developers could create bespoke apps to run in it? That’d be pretty cool and a lot more likely than Apple allowing Adobe to show video etc in webpages. Plus they’ve had a long, long time to figure it out, so you never know.

Slicker still would be if Adobe, instead of creating a platform app for AIR stuff to run in, made it possible to output from AIR directly as a native iPhone app, test in Device Central and deploy via iTunes just like we think traditional Apple devs will. Top all that off with well-written custom AS3 libraries (asking a lot from Adobe I know) for the various types of multi-touch interaction we’re all now so used to on the iPhone and you’d have a kick-ass, user-transparent dev platform based on flash. In fact, stretching this a little further, I can imagine testing these apps out directly in Device Central on a forthcoming MacBook Pro using its new multi-touch trackpad to get everything just so.

Now I’m not saying this is all that likely – something on that scale would more than likely require a big dollop of help from Adobe – but I’m crossing every finger I’ve got. I can dream, right?

February 13th, 2008 by Ad.
It's all about the flash, iphone | 1 Comment »

This one’s been bugging me for a while. On the iPhone, as with most other mobiles, SMS messages pile up as on-screen summaries so I can tell at a glance at my still-locked phone what events I have waiting. This doesn’t seem to happen with email, however. So it’ll buzz, I’ll have a quick look and if there’s nothing there I’ll know it was an email, but I can’t screen it and make any kind of informed judgement there and then. Well I want that. Maybe with a different coloured box, but even an indication of “10 new emails” would be an improvement. 

February 5th, 2008 by Ad.
It's all about the iphone | No Comments »